‘I come, madame,’ said Lucius, after the politest possible reception from the lady, who insisted that he should take the trouble to seat himself in one of the uncomfortably square arm-chairs, whose angles were designed in defiance of the first principles of human anatomy—‘I come to speak to you of a subject which I cannot doubt is very near to your heart. I come to speak of the dead.’ Mademoiselle Dumarques looked at him wonderingly, but said nothing. ‘I come to you on an important matter connected with your sister, Mademoiselle Félicie, afterwards Mrs. Glenlyne.’ He made a bold plunge; for, after all, the name might not have been Glenlyne; and even if it were, Mademoiselle Dumarques might have known nothing about it. But the name elicited no expression of surprise from Mademoiselle Dumarques. She shook her head pensively, sighed, wiped away a tear from her sharp black eyes, and then asked, ‘What can you have to say to me about my sister, Madame Glenlyne?’ The name was evidently right. ‘I come to you to speak of her only child, Lucille; who has been brought up in ignorance of her parents, and whom it is my wish to restore to her rightful position in society.’ ‘Her rightful position!’ cried Julie Dumarques, with a scornful look in her hard pinched face; ‘her rightful position in society, as a milliner’s niece! You are vastly mistaken, sir, if you suppose that it is in my power to assist my niece. I find it a hard struggle to support myself by the labour of my hands.’ ‘So,’ thought Lucius, ‘Mademoiselle Julie inherits her father’s miserly nature. She has a house in Rouen which must bring her in seventy to a hundred pounds a year, and she has a fairly prosperous business, but repudiates the claims of her niece. Hard world, in which blood is no thicker than water. Thank Heaven, my Lucille needs nothing from her kindred.’ ‘I am happy to tell you, madame,’ he said after a little pause, ‘that Miss Glenlyne asks and requires no assistance from you or any other relative.’ ‘I am very glad to hear that,’ answered Mademoiselle Julie. ‘Of course I should be pleased to hear of the poor child’s welfare, though I have never seen her face, and though her mother treated me in no very sisterly spirit, keeping from me the secret of her marriage, while she confided it to my sister Hortense. True that I was here at the time of her return to Rouen, and too busy to go yonder to see her. The tidings of her death took me by surprise. I had no idea of her danger, or I should naturally have gone to see her. But as for Félicie’s marriage or the birth of her child, I knew nothing of either event till after the death of my sister Hortense, when I found some letters and a kind of journal, kept by poor Félicie, among her papers.’ ‘Will you let me see that journal and those letters?’ asked Lucius eagerly. ‘I should hardly be justified in showing them to a stranger.’